The Jews Who Built Hollywood: Immigrants, Dreams, and the Silver Screen

The Furriers Who Built a Dream Factory

Here is one of the great ironies of American history: the country’s most powerful tool of cultural mythology — the Hollywood film industry — was invented by people who were not, by any conventional measure, American at all.

They were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Furriers, glove salesmen, junk dealers, garment workers. They spoke Yiddish. They had accents. They came from shtetls in Poland, Hungary, Lithuania, and Ukraine. They had arrived in America with nothing, and they built an empire that would define how America saw itself — and how the world saw America — for the next century.

Louis B. Mayer (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Adolph Zukor (Paramount). Carl Laemmle (Universal). William Fox (Fox Film Corporation). Harry, Albert, Sam, and Jack Warner (Warner Bros.). Samuel Goldwyn (Goldwyn Pictures, later MGM). Harry Cohn (Columbia). Marcus Loew (Loew’s/MGM).

These men did not just create a business. They created a dream — and then projected it, at twenty-four frames per second, onto screens around the world.

Why Jews, Why Film?

The question deserves an answer, because the dominance was extraordinary. By the 1920s, virtually every major Hollywood studio was founded and run by Jewish immigrants or their sons. This was not a coincidence. Several factors converged:

The industry was new. Unlike law, medicine, banking, or academia — where established Protestant elites controlled access — the film industry had no gatekeepers. It was uncharted territory, and outsiders could enter where they would have been blocked elsewhere.

Jews had entertainment experience. Many had backgrounds in the Yiddish theater, vaudeville, and retail — all of which required understanding what audiences wanted and how to give it to them.

They arrived at the right time. The great wave of Eastern European Jewish immigration (1880-1920) coincided exactly with the birth of the motion picture industry. These immigrants were young, hungry, and willing to take risks on a new technology that established businessmen dismissed as a novelty.

They were outsiders who wanted in. This is the deepest explanation. As Neal Gabler argued in his landmark book An Empire of Their Own, the Jewish moguls were driven by an overwhelming desire to belong to America — to be accepted by a country that had taken them in but not yet fully embraced them. They couldn’t join the right country clubs or attend the right schools. So they did something more audacious: they created America’s image of itself.

The Moguls: Profiles in Ambition

Louis B. Mayer (1884–1957): Born Lazar Meir in Minsk, Russia. Came to America as a child. Started in the scrap metal business, then bought a movie theater in Haverhill, Massachusetts. Built Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer into the most glamorous studio in Hollywood. His specialty was wholesome, optimistic, family-friendly entertainment. He believed in an America of small towns, good values, and happy endings — an America that bore little resemblance to his own impoverished immigrant childhood. He was the highest-paid executive in America for several years running.

Adolph Zukor (1873–1976): Born in Ricse, Hungary. Orphaned at seven. Came to America at sixteen with $25. Worked in the fur trade, then moved into nickelodeons and film distribution. Founded Paramount Pictures and pioneered the concept of the “feature film” — full-length movies rather than short subjects. He lived to 103.

Carl Laemmle (1867–1939): Born in Laupheim, Germany. Founded Universal Pictures in 1912. Known for two things: an obsessive practice of hiring relatives (he employed over seventy family members at Universal) and producing some of the most innovative films of the silent era.

The Warner Brothers — Harry, Albert, Sam, and Jack — sons of a Polish-Jewish cobbler. Started by exhibiting films in a storefront theater in New Castle, Pennsylvania. Built Warner Bros. into one of the great studios. Produced The Jazz Singer (1927), the first feature-length “talkie,” which — not coincidentally — told the story of a cantor’s son choosing between Jewish tradition and American show business.

Samuel Goldwyn (1879–1974): Born Schmuel Gelbfisz in Warsaw. Changed his name multiple times. Known for his malapropisms (“Include me out”) and for his commitment to quality. Co-founded Paramount, then Goldwyn Pictures (which merged into MGM), then became the most successful independent producer in Hollywood.

Harry Cohn (1891–1958): Born in New York to German-Jewish immigrants. Founded Columbia Pictures. Known as the most feared man in Hollywood — tyrannical, vulgar, and brilliant. He ran Columbia like a dictator, but he made great films.

The American Dream, Jewish Edition

What the moguls created on screen was a very specific version of America — and it was, paradoxically, both deeply Jewish and aggressively un-Jewish.

The America of the classic Hollywood film was a place of opportunity, where anyone (even a poor immigrant) could succeed through hard work and determination. It was a place of assimilation, where differences melted away and everyone became American. It was a place of romance, where love conquered all barriers. It was a place of moral clarity, where good triumphed over evil.

This vision was Jewish in its bones — it reflected the immigrant experience of transformation, the longing for acceptance, the belief that a new country could offer a new life. But it was conspicuously absent of Jewish characters, Jewish themes, or Jewish culture. The moguls’ America was Christian America — Christmas, church, small-town values.

The Hidden Jewishness

The moguls’ suppression of their Jewish identity was not absolute — it leaked through in subtle ways. The themes of their films — the outsider who proves himself, the poor boy who makes good, the immigrant who finds a home, the importance of family — were unmistakably Jewish themes, even when the characters were not.

The Jazz Singer (1927) was the most explicit example: a film about a cantor’s son who must choose between his father’s synagogue and the American stage. The protagonist, Jakie Rabinowitz, changes his name to Jack Robin — a choice the Warner Brothers understood intimately.

But for decades, Jews on screen were mostly invisible or stereotyped. The moguls feared that too much visible Jewishness would provoke the anti-Semitism they had spent their lives trying to escape. This fear was not irrational — Father Coughlin’s radio broadcasts, Charles Lindbergh’s speeches, and the America First movement all accused Jews of controlling Hollywood and using it for propaganda.

The Legacy

The Hollywood studio system declined in the 1950s and 1960s, broken by antitrust rulings, television, and changing tastes. The moguls aged and died. But their creation — the American film industry — remained the most powerful cultural force on the planet.

And eventually, Jewish themes came out of hiding. Fiddler on the Roof (1971). Annie Hall (1977). Yentl (1983). Schindler’s List (1993). The Jewish identity that the moguls had so carefully concealed was finally, proudly, visible on the screens they had built.

The irony is complete. A group of Jewish immigrants, desperate to be American, created the machinery that defined America — and, in the end, that machinery was used to tell their own story. The furriers and glove salesmen had the last word.